Lit Hub Daily: November 14, 2018

• “I could murder some sleep. Even at the price of reckoning with my soul.” Marina Benjamin’s adventures in insomnia. | Lit Hub
• HERMAN MELVILLE DID A THING, or: a 100% super-real artifact of self-promotion from the author of Moby-Dick. | Lit Hub
• Eight short stories about long-distance running to read when you don’t feel like actually running a long distance. | Lit Hub
• “He was not an illustrator, nor was he a filmmaker; he was a writer and, importantly, a reader.” Tyler Malone, Rion Amilcar Scott, and Nikesh Shukla remember Stan Lee. | Lit Hub
• Putting the “author” back in “authority.” Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov and others unpack their own famous works. | Lit Hub
• “Wouldn’t it be great to perceive the warping of space-time?” Astronomer Chris Impey asking important questions. | Lit Hub
• “Part of country’s abiding power is that sense of community in the fellow-feeling among sad sacks.” On the complicated legacy of American country music. | Lit Hub
• Write a really bad first draft, and more advice from the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35. | Lit Hub
• This Week in Secrets of the Book Critics: author and critic Steph Cha on Raymond Chandler, Lovecraftian fiction, and pans vs. positive reviews. | Book Marks
• Time to brush up on your Golden Age classics with Neil Nyren, as he takes us on a tour through New Zealand crime writer Ngaio Marsh’s life and work. | CrimeReads
• A look at the fraught history and internal divisions of AWP, that “strange amalgam of dreams and money, idealism and pragmatism” that is a literary non-profit. | LARB
• “Glamour and destruction mixed with youth and nighttime and black cars and The Left Hand of Darkness.” Why Ursula K. Le Guin inspires so many musicians. | Electric Literature
• Gabrielle Bellot sees the optimist in James Baldwin, despite the bleakness of If Beale Street Could Talk. | The Paris Review
• The fish behind The Old Man and the Sea? A letter from Ernest Hemingway describing his capture of a giant marlin has sold for $28,000. | The Guardian
• “What interests me is how you figure out childcare when you’re planning a heist.” A profile of the “ghoulishly witty” Gillian Flynn. | GQ
• “If families didn’t break apart, I suppose there’d be no need for art.” Rick Moody interviews Loudon Wainwright III. | The Believer
• Early 19th and 20th-century texts from one of the most significant private collections of Russian literature in America will be up for auction at Christie’s. | Fine Books Magazine

Also on Lit Hub: Read Across America: Las Vegas’ Neon Lit • Dirty Dancing belongs in the lesbian rom-com canon • Read a short story from The April 3rd Incident